The results of spending 45 years and $3 billion to find a central repository for nuclear waste are that Maine Yankee and 76 other nuclear facilities are proceeding with individual plans to store the waste. But that doesn’t mean the federal Department of Energy should stop its search for a single site or that Congress should begin using the money dedicated to it for other purposes.
That is what could happen, however, if budget plans in the House and Senate pass. Those plans reduce the program from full funding of $409 million to $335 million in the Senate or $281 million in the House. The money for the program comes from ratepayers — customers pay one-tenth of a penny per kilowatt hour of nuclear-generated electricity. The money goes into the Nuclear Waste Fund to be used with Defense Department money to test and, if acceptable, build a waste site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
Congress has other ideas. In order to live under ever-tightening budget caps it agreed to in 1997, it has had to become creative with the way it finances various proposals. So, for instance, it labels things like the 2000 Census an emergency to fund it through the projected surplus or uses forward funding, which pays for a program with money borrowed from a future budget. And it quietly taps into sources of revenue — in this case, from electricity users.
The problem with doing this, besides being dishonest, is that it may stop a program that already has had more starts and stops than a Manhattan taxi. Work at Yucca Mountain began after the U.S. Geological Survey recommended it, among others, in 1976. It was supposed to be ready to accept waste beginning in 1998, but scientists now are not scheduled to declare even whether the site is suitable until next year. At the earliest, the site would be ready to accept the high-level waste in 2010.
Since 1983, users of electricity from Maine Yankee have sent more than $226 million to the waste fund to find a safe storage site that will last tens of thousands of years. The huge project deserves long-term congressional commitment. It should not be sacrificed to short-term budget maneuvers.
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